Helping Paralympic athletes is their business

Gary Kingston, Vancouver Sun08.27.2012

Ottobock technician Steffen Ziaja repairs a wheelchair at the company’s repair facility in the Paralympic Village at the London 2012 Paralympic Games on Monday. Ottobock, an international company based in Germany, is repairing prosthesis and wheelchairs for the Paralympic athletes at the Games.Larry Wong
/ Larry Wong/Edmonton Journal/Post

Ottobock technician Peter Franzel examines a prosthesis at the company’s repair facility in the Paralympic Village at the London 2012 Paralympic Games on Monday. Ottobock, an international company based in Germany, is repairing prosthesis and wheelchairs for the Paralympic athletes at the Games.Larry Wong
/ Larry Wong/Edmonton Journal/Post

Paralympic athletes wait for service at Ottobock’s repair facility in the Paralympic Village at the London 2012 Paralympic Games on Monday. Ottobock, an international company based in Germany, is repairing prosthesis and wheelchairs for the Paralympic athletes at the Games.Larry Wong
/ Larry Wong/Edmonton Journal/Post

LONDON – Peter Franzel lifts up the creaky, old wheelchair and spins a tire to demonstrate how wobbly the wheels are.

Previous welding marks are evident along the makeshift frame. The push handles off the back look like a couple of steel bars taken from a construction site and bent into an L shape.

“I don’t know, the oldest part must be older than me,” the Ottobock organizing director says with a laugh. “You cannot repair it any more. Look at this thing, you can spend hours and hours and hours, but it will still not be very good.”

It belonged to a female Egyptian powerlifter who showed up in London on the weekend and asked the technicians with Ottobock if they could perform some magic.

Ottobock is the German company and longtime Paralympic sponsor that provides the 80 craftsmen and welders who service – free of charge – the wheelchairs, prosthetics and other mechanical aids that keep athletes with a disability moving.

Some of that rudimentary equipment, particularly from the poorer African and Asian countries, can leave the technicians shaking their heads.

“All self-made, this is not a wheelchair from an official manufacturer,” says Franzel of the Egyptian lifter’s everyday chair. “I think they’ve somewhere saw a wheelchair and tried to build it.”

When it couldn’t be repaired, Franzel provided the grateful athlete with a new one. He did the same thing Sunday for an official of the Central African Republic whose chair was also beyond repair.

“We tried to fix it and after three hours of welding and bending and things like that, we just had to say ‘Okay, nothing we can do about that,’” said Franzel. “I went to him and said ‘sorry.’ You could see in his face he was kind of sad. But then I said ‘come with me’ and I showed him his new one. He was so happy, just smiling.”

Ottobock can’t always be so benevolent.

“Of course, we cannot give wheelchairs to everybody,” says Franzel. “This is just not possible. But if we have some persons from really poor countries, we say ‘okay, let’s see what we can do.’

“Honest, we would never give a wheelchair to Canada,” he adds with a hearty laugh.

There are 13 Ottobock workshops at London, including a 650-square foot centre in the main village. It is equipped with a drill machine, a band saw, various grinders, a state-of-the-art prosthetic rebuild table and a parts department stocked with 15,000 spare parts. A dozen technicians were busy inside on Monday doing everything from replacing wheelchair tires to complex knee joint repairs on high-end prosthetic legs worth $50,000 Canadian and more.

“It starts with in-lays for shoes because someone has one leg shorter than the other,” said Franzel of the kind of work the technicians do. “Some might have high-technology prosthesis and they want alignment for a millimetre right or left. We have special machines where you can see with a laser. It is very important for prosthesis that everything is line.”

Ottobock also has work tables at nine sport venues, with the welders at the wheelchair rugby arena expected to be among the busiest.

In the lobby of the main repair centre Monday, athletes from Japan, Germany and Russia were filling out work orders to get their equipment repaired. The Ottobock technicians have been brought in from 19 countries. Twenty-three different languages are spoken.

“It’s a pretty rewarding job,” said Belgian Wouter Van Elsacker as he was doing one of the more simple tasks by adding some cushioning to the handle of an athlete’s crutch. “When you fix something for an athlete, especially athletes who don’t have a lot of money ... they are so happy.”

Van Elsacker joked that some of the equipment is “like from the Middle Ages ... sometimes you are a little bit surprised they can also do sports with it.”

Among the 2,188 repair jobs Ottobock did in Beijing in 2008 was the fix on a ramshackle, self-made hand cycle belonging to Gas Beogo of Burkina Faso. Ottobock didn’t have any parts for it, but a technician managed to open a link in the chain and, utilizing a piece of chain supplied by the French team and a gear box provided by the Americans, managed to make the bike rideable.

“We liked him and after the Games, one year later, we decided to send down a hand-bike to Burkina Faso. He was so, so happy with it and sent some photos,” said Franzel. “Yesterday, he showed up with the hand-bike and, of course, after three years in Africa it needed some repairs. The lever for the brake was broken and little stuff like that, but we fixed it up for him.

“They come in with a problem and go out happy.”

None more so, perhaps, than the Mongolian archer, Baartarjav Dambadondog, who won his country’s first ever gold in Beijing two days after the Ottobock technicians made him a new, lower-leg prosthesis to replace the one he had worn to China, one made of used parts, leather and foam.

“He came back to the workshop and he was so proud,” said Franzel. “The technician who made his leg, he kissed him and invited him home to Mongolia.

“It was archery and he didn’t need it [to compete]. But maybe it was a little bit of ‘Okay, I got a new prosthetic’ and he was extra motivated and he made the best shot of his life.”

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